Search form

Just Wait Until Ferguson Police Get Federally Funded Drones

Through the fog of Twitter, it’s difficult to discern the
precise details of what’s been happening in Ferguson, Mo., in
the 10 days of protests spurred by the police killing of an unarmed
teenager.

Still, maybe it’s not too early to wonder: When, exactly,
did the United States become a banana republic?

“Why armored vehicles in a Midwestern inner suburb?”
asks my Cato Institute colleague
Walter Olson. What could possibly justify police
“red-dotting” peaceful protesters with
laser sights, or
an attempted head-shot, with a tear gas canister, at a man
standing in his own yard, insisting, “this [is] my
property!”?
Here you can watch police fumigate a news crew and take down
their cameras — then chase off the other journalists filming
the assault.

It’s no accident that
technology developed for population control in foreign
counterinsurgencies is being turned inward.

The Ferguson clampdown has even law and order conservatives like
Red State’s
Erick Erickson worried about “the militarization of the
police and overkill by local police forces.” But maybe
they’re not worried enough.

Last week, I found myself musing darkly, “Just wait till
Ferguson’s cops get federally funded drones.”
If you think paramilitary policing looks dystopian now, just wait
till you see what’s being
cooked up in defense contractors’ labs.

For decades now, as Radley Balko makes clear in his
indispensable 2013 book, Rise of the Warrior Cop, federal
subsidies have encouraged the proliferation of military ordnance on
the home front — from M-16s to grenade launchers to 30-ton
armored vehicles. Since 2002, the Department of Homeland
Security has accelerated police paramilitarization with more
than $7 billion in Urban Areas Security Initiative grants.

With Homeland Security funding, “Police departments are
arming themselves with military assets often reserved for war
zones,” Sen. Tom Coburn,
R-Okla., noted in
a 2012 report on the UASI program. Among those assets are
surveillance drones and the Long Range Acoustic Device — a
sound cannon deployed last week in Ferguson that can disperse
crowds with a 149-decibel assault (permanent hearing loss begins at
130).

A Homeland Security report obtained by the Electronic Frontier
Foundation in 2013 revealed that the agency has considered
outfitting its expanding inventory of drones with “non-lethal
weapons designed to immobilize” targets of interest.

Meanwhile, both Homeland Security and the Pentagon maintain a
keen interest in developing crowd-control weapons for occupations
at home and abroad. In 2007, the department’s science and
technology arm “contracted
for the development of the ‘LED Incapacitator,’ a nauseating
strobe” weapon meant to overwhelm and disorient targets with
rapid, random pulses of light.

Some have called it the “puke saber,” but the final
product won’t necessarily be handheld. As the department
noted in a cutesy blogpost entitled “Enough to Make You
Sick,” “output and size can easily be scaled up to fit
the need; immobilizing a mob, for instance, might call for a
wide-angle ‘bazooka’ version.”

Just imagine what a “puke cannon” or a “pain
ray” could do to a crowd of looters — or a crew of
pesky journalists. In time, and with the help of federal subsidies,
we may graduate from banana republic to a science-fiction dystopia
straight from the fevered brain of
Philip K. Dick.

As James Madison warned at the Constitutional Convention in
Philadelphia, “The means of defence agst. foreign danger,
have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.”

It’s no accident that technology developed for population
control in foreign counterinsurgencies is being turned inward
— in fact, it’s been a matter of deliberate federal
policy. But it’s not too late to reverse the slide.